By Adaku Nwakanma, Tony Elumelu Foundation
Many tales have crossed the threshold between the riotous city of Lagos and those yellow rickety buses that work tirelessly to convey people from morning till night.
One of them came in the form of a man playing the flute as he solicited for help at the entrance of a late-night bus loading passengers to Oshodi. He had just been in an accident and occasionally dabbed his bleeding nostrils. Apart from him, teams of schoolchildren and young men and women would occasionally stop to ask for a completion of their bus fare, or other favours.
“You mean you don’t have any money at all?” the man with the broad shoulders seated on the extension filled in with a wooden plank would ask one of them. Sometimes it’s good to ask questions.
I told my ex this one time we were driving around Yaba with the windows down. I told him that the man he had just given money did not look genuine. He had that intense look like the man who came to me when I was travelling from Owerri to Port Harcourt asking for money to go back to school after coming into town, and who promptly ignored me when I asked for his school I.D. He probably cursed me too as the other passengers, likely thinking about reaching into their purses, joined into asking. We saw the man again some weeks later, or rather he saw us. He did not recognise us but my ex did. And it was more than just recognition that settled upon his young face.
On my way to Ikeja, as I was seated — thankfully — by the window contemplating, a woman in her mid to late twenties tapped my shoulder from behind. The conductor was trying to get more people to enter his bus and we were there, waiting.
“Excuse me, please can you help me?”
I already knew what was coming. Her transport fare was not enough and she wanted me to help. How could she have known that I, too, sat there rationing the money in my wallet and wishing someone could help me pay for my goings and comings in this capitalist city?
I was getting irritated. Did they write “buoyant” on my face? I asked myself, remembering one who had asked for help with the fare to enter a bus going to Yaba, on the other side of Computer Village heading to the mall.
“Go and enter a bus and ask your fellow passengers,” I told him they would be more inclined to help and he looked at me incredulously as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
A part of my annoyance was that someone what taking my advice and I couldn’t help. Or I could, according to a plethora of information which sometimes outrightly says that 50 naira was too small an amount to have any concrete plans for. Information that enforces guilt when you’re unable to perform generosity and which subtly implied that it was rude to emphasise a no to a plea for help, that you had to be carrying shoulder or too full of yourself — like there was any other person you could ever be full of.
So I sat there mumbling to myself until her voice called back my attention: “Are you going to help me or not?” I managed a weak nod in the negative before quickly averting my eyes.
And just like that, she tapped the next person, and the next, even reaching further in front to tap the woman who had just come in until she found someone willing to assist her. She reminded me of the young boy who, some time ago, stood resolutely by the window until the man he was speaking to had made up his mind.
Witnessing it happen to someone else is greatly different from experiencing moments like this personally. At that moment, I realised my guilt, for whatever reason, was not helping anyone. I could empathise and still have given a resolute no instead of begrudgingly considering a yes. It would have saved us both our time.
Instead of thanking God that I wasn’t the one who was approached, I witnessed active tenacity in the face of dire circumstances, a lack of shame for those circumstances, and the hope that things would not always remain the same. I learnt to shed my self-importance, and keep things moving, whether I said yes or more importantly, whether I said no. It also became a poignant note on asking for help (which I’m terrible at) and how to keep things moving, whether I receive a yes, and more importantly, whether I receive a no.
